Despite a surge in sales, Palm CFO Doug Jeffries predicts that the smartphone maker's immediate future won't be a happy one.
These revelations came today in a conference call with analysts and reporters as Palm announced its third-quarter results for fiscal year 2010. Wall Street immediately spanked the company's stock in after- …

BeOS

The market is brutal

So the market is brutal. VC's, the carriers and Jon Rubinstein have been lucky enough to live their dream for a couple of years.

The crippling blow for Palm is that they sold 900,000 phones, but end users bought only 400,000. Adding in opening inventory, the channel is stuffed with product to last at least 4 months, probably 6-12 as sales taper off. Palm needs to live on life support for another couple of years if it is to live. It's not so bad; Apple had to put the last Lisa production into a landfill, despite being the forerunner of every Windows and Mac PC in the world. Apple had to slog away selling beastly OS8 and 9 Macs for years while OS X developed. And look how many years Microsoft has to keep things like search, Xbox, Zune etc. on life support in the hope they will grow enough to support the company in its dotage.

WebOS got a free pass to the market with the unsatisifed demand created at other carriers by Apple with its AT&T exclusive. Now that demand can also be served by Android, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series, and maybe even iPhone. Carriers are never going to order enough volume of the next Palm product to drive economies of scale.

Big lesson for Rubinstein: "monkey see, monkey do" won't turn you into the alpha male. You can't take a shortcut to an established market; it'll gobble you up and spit you out. Steve Jobs took twenty years of successive development and repositioning of the underlying engineering to achieve iPhone (including a reverse takeover of Apple by Next). iPhone was launched at the earliest moment it was technologically doable, and it was positioned far away from existing products.

Its the phone, not the OS

The Pre is too small to be useful. OK, granted I'm not as young as I used to be and my eyes aren't what they used to be, When I was playing with the phone two things stood out. The keyboard was really too small for my average sized fingers. I spent most of my time zooming in and zooming out on a very small screen. At times the screen was unreadable due to its small size. Put the WebOS in a larger device like a tungsten and then they'd have a killer product that I would buy in a heartbeat.

WebOS is great..

WebOS is great.. but who needs it?

WebOS came at least a year too late to compete with the iPhone, but development took so long that Palm missed the opportunity of using Android instead.

So, now Palm have bet the barn on a proprietary OS that has launched into an exceptionally tough market where is has to compete against not only the iPhone and Android, but also a revamped Symbian, Samsung's new Bada platform, the upcoming MeeGo OS (the merged Maemo-Moblin platform), and then there's Windows Mobile, LiMo, ACCESS and more.

I'd love to see Palm survive, I really think that they won't. A shame if they vanish.

webOS

webOS is an excellent platform, and actually achieved what Steve Jobs failed with; producing a mobile platform where all applications are developed with web technologies. I still feel it has legs.

Whether Palm are there to see those legs stretched is another thing altogether. I would tip Motorola to put in an offer - their multi-personality approach to platform development needs to be rectified.

WebOS Java Disaster

Hmmm, when I first saw WebOS I was like this is great, then I ask where is Java and which point I found out there was no Java API to code to. From that point, I figured it's already dead and that was a year ago. Few developer are going to invest time/money coding to a nonstandard JS/HTML API. Apple initially tried that with the iPhone, but focused on the object c route (leverage all those Mac developers) and it clearly worked.

They should have done what Google did, which is provide a Java API and I guarantee the number of developers who taget WebOs would much bigger.

WebOs is clever - but lots of faults outstanding for uk users

I've been using a Palm Pre for the last few months and whilst I love the smooth multi-tasking it fails in one extremely important area. It keeps dropping off the network into a well known "Phone Offline" mode because of some bug sync'ing email to the phone. quite how that affects voice calls I do not know.

The multiple OS updates have improved the system considerably but are so US-focussed that EU 3G/GSM users often find strange bugs. UK users don't have access to the paid-for apps so all you get are the often useless free "fart-apps". the folks who has WebOS-doctored their phones are finding massive problems when updates are sent out by o2.

However, on the other hand, it syncs with my kontact (linux) calendar which few other phones have!